by Paul McAuley
Apart from the deep brainburn of knowing that they might never understand what had happened to them.
Apart from their marriage falling apart.
Apart from the bone-deep need to find out what Willie and his friends from Outland Archaeological Services had discovered out there in the Badlands. Maybe Bria was right. Maybe what Lisa thought she wanted was something the ghost wanted. Some deep alien urge to return to where it had come from, or something weirder and deeper. But at that moment she didn’t care.
Bria said, ‘One thing is certain: it’s deeply and dangerously bad. And then there’s the agent in charge of the investigation. Adam Nevers. I told you I had a contact in TCU? She says that he’s one of their most senior field agents. Smart and tough, very experienced. And he has history with Ada Morange. He was on Mangala when she brought down the first Ghajar ships.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘He’s hardcore, Lisa. Not someone you want as an enemy. A few years after the Mangala thing, he shut down one of Ada Morange’s companies in France. Something to do with importing biochines without the proper licences. After that he was part of a big investigation into her affairs, just before she moved most of her business out to the New Frontier. And now he’s here, and it looks like he’s still on her case.’
‘Which means that this is something important. That it’s not just some trivial breakout.’
‘Which means,’ Bria said, with the exaggerated patience she used on her sons when they were acting up, ‘that you don’t want to get caught up in the middle of a feud between them. My advice? Forget it. It’s Chinatown.’
‘Bria, the whole fucking planet is Chinatown. We come up and out and build shopping malls and golf courses and pretend we’ve civilised the place. But there’s a couple of million years’ worth of weird alien shit lying around everywhere. Do you really think we can just ignore that? Do you really think it ignores us?’
Bria finally agreed to a meeting at the code factory the next morning. Lisa drove home through the stop-and-go traffic of the city’s sprawl, through the hills on Highway One amongst the windy roar of big rigs and road trains, with the dazzle of oncoming high-beams on the other side of the highway nagging at her and a headache beginning to build behind her eyes. She was short of supplies and had planned to stop at the community store on the way home. Instead, she pulled into the lot of the Shop’n’Save on the commercial strip at the junction with the high desert road, one part of her mind knowing exactly what she was thinking of doing and hating herself for it, another part knowing that she needed anonymity.
She told Pete to guard the pickup truck and went inside and uncoupled a shopping cart and patrolled the towering aisles. She bought bags of dog chow and rice, cans of beans, a couple of kilos of frozen hamburger meat. Bathroom tissue. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. And here was the liquor aisle and the shelves where half a hundred brands of vodka were displayed, from generic gallon jugs to high-end Russian and Polish brands. Clear glass gleaming like a queen’s ransom.
12. Wizard Work
‘Wizards work because they want to work,’ Aunty Jael told Tony. ‘There’s no need to bully them into doing it. No need for threats. It’s what they do. It’s their vocation.’
‘The problem is not their work ethic,’ Tony said. ‘It’s that they don’t seem to realise they must find something that can be used to win them more time.’
They were standing, Tony and the hand that Aunty Jael was currently using, in a glassed-in gallery overlooking the hangar-sized work space. Accommodation pods were stacked at one end; the big bubble of the aquarium stood in the centre, half-obscured by monitoring equipment. Inside, the stumps of the live stromatolites squatted in two metres of murky water; around it, the six wizards, dressed in traditional white coats emblazoned with heraldic stains, scorch marks and hand-lettered slogans in archaic fonts, scurried to and fro as they set up their latest experiment.
‘Things might go more quickly if we had access to more processing space,’ Aunty Jael said.
Today she was present in a skinny ball-jointed hand with glossy white plastic skin and a small head crowned by a circlet of stalked eyes. A number, 7, was stencilled in black ink on its chestplate. The 7 had, in the antique style that Aunty Jael favoured, a dash across its stem.
Tony’s grandfather had purchased her fifty years ago, but she was much older than that – although she claimed to have forgotten her original identity and the circumstances of her death and lamination, she said that she had been born on Earth and could remember what it was like before the Jackaroo had arrived in the aftermath of the Spasm, with their offer to help. And while she was an imperfect simulation running in the laminated architecture of her original brain, got up from bundles of reflexes, habits and memories, Tony never doubted that there was an actual person behind the hands and windows she used to interact with the world: astute, absent-minded, and somewhat remote, wryly amused by what she called the eternal theatre of human folly, and unswervingly loyal. She tutored the family’s children, was involved with Òrélolu’s work on sleepy sickness, supervised research on introducing salmon into Skadi’s icy ocean, increasing the efficiency of the kraken-oil refinery and improving the cultivation of pine trees and the quality of their timber. She had advised Tony about the deals he had made during his two years of freebooting, analysed artefacts he had sent back to Skadi, and expressed enthusiasm for the slime-planet adventure, whose success now hung on the fraying hope that the wizards would find something in the stromatolites’ archival genetics that could be linked to sleepy sickness.
This was not the first time she had asked Tony to provide more processing space; like all laminated minds she tended to repeat herself, was locked in the deep grooves of old obsessions. He patiently explained that he had twice asked the council to grant the wizards access to the city net, and had twice been refused for the same reason. ‘They want the work quarantined. They are worried that an eidolon will leak out. Or some kind of meme plague even worse than sleepy sickness.’
‘Did you tell them about the firewall I devised?’
‘They were not convinced. We must manage with what we have.’
‘Unless we access the city net anyway.’
‘We cannot do that without permission from the council.’
‘I need only permission from a member of the family, Master Tony.’
Tony glanced across the work space to the kitchen area, where Lancelot Askia sprawled in a chair, watching something in a window. Hopefully one of his pornographic war fantasies, not a feed from a drone that Aunty Jael had failed to find and subvert.
He said, ‘Have you talked to anyone else about this?’
‘Of course not. They would not agree to it.’
‘Neither can I. It would be sedition.’
‘I agree that it would be a drastic measure,’ Aunty Jael said. One of the stalked eyes that crowned the hand’s stubby trunk was watching the wizards working below; the rest were aimed at Tony. ‘But shutting down this research would be a bad mistake. The archival genetics are rich in unrealised potential. Since you cannot extend the time granted for this research, I feel that it is my duty to suggest ways of making the most of what you have.’
Tony thought for a moment, then said, ‘Could you link me with my ship?’
He missed her more than he could say, was always aware of the silence in his head, of being trapped alone in his skull.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Aunty Jael said. ‘I do not have access to that system.’
‘Then think of something else. Think of a way of making our wizards do what they’re actually supposed to be doing.’
The wizards had been working in Aunty Jael’s laboratory for twenty-nine days now. Tony and Aunty Jael were supervising them; Junot Johnson sourced the materials and items of equipment they required; Lancelot Askia was a permanent reminder of Opeyemi’s disapproval, skulking around, examining the wizards’ notes and worksheets, asking awkward questions. Their new leader, Cho Wing-Jam
es, claimed that the work had already yielded some very interesting results. He and the other wizards had dissected the complex molecular machinery that replicated the archival genetic material, were developing a working model of the stromatolites’ data-transmission system, and had disproved several theories about the mathematical systems of the Old Old Ones. The problem was that Cho Wing-James’s ideas about what was interesting had very little overlap with Tony’s, and none at all with the family’s.
Cho Wing-James was the beanpole who had charged at Tony after the thermobaric bomb had been planted, an animated, untidy scarecrow with a ragged mop of hair, given to mumbling cryptic snatches of internal dialogue and smacking his forehead with the heel of his hand as if trying to dislodge a jammed gear train in the mechanism of some internal argument. He claimed that he was from Earth. From London, England. He’d come all the way out here, he said, because this was where the shit was at. The real shit, not Boxbuilder ruins or Ghostkeeper tombs, or even archival genetics containing secrets millions of years old. He believed that there were Elder Culture artefacts so wild and strange that people had not yet recognised them for what they were.
‘The Jackaroo gave us wormholes and shuttles,’ he said, ‘and we understand those because, hey, shuttles are basically big old spaceships, and we already had crude spaceships when the Jackaroo made contact. And although we didn’t know how to open wormholes, we had theories about them, so the idea that they allow near-instantaneous travel to every part of the Milky Way wasn’t new or startling. It’s the same with most Elder Culture tech. It’s the kind of stuff we might have come up with, in time. But there are a few artefacts that are so weird we barely recognise them as artefacts, and can’t begin to understand their function, and it’s not much of a leap to believe that there’s stuff we don’t even recognise as technology. Stuff so advanced that it makes us look like insects walking through the interface of a qube. At best we might glimpse a bare flicker of light, but we’d have no way of knowing what it means.’
He could happily elaborate his ideas about hyper-evolved Elder Cultures for hours, said that it was quite possible that there were aliens far more advanced than the Jackaroo – civilisations that could harness the entire energy output of stars, construct megastructures like Dyson spheres and stellar engines, manipulate space-time, and organise information flow across the galaxy or even the entire universe. These beings, Cho said, would be like gods. Incomprehensible, unknowable, unseeable.
‘I don’t mean that they look and behave so differently we think they’re animals, or biochines, or like the trees you have here,’ he said. ‘If they are trees.’
‘We call them trees,’ Tony said. ‘Because that’s what they are.’
‘Well, they look more like giant kelp to me, or big mops stuck in the ground and spray-painted unnatural shades of yellow and orange. This world, it’s like it’s always autumn. You know? The chill in the air, the colours of the vegetation. Or what passes for vegetation. But the angle of light, the verticality of it, is tropical. It’s a weird combination. Anyway, the kelp-mop-tree-things, they could be an Elder Culture species, communing through what passes for their root systems, through chemicals they release into the air. Thinking really slow thoughts that take decades to complete. But mistaking them for trees when really they’re sentient beings is only a category error. Trying to detect and understand a truly advanced civilisation would be a completely different order of difficulty. And that’s what makes it so exciting,’ Cho said.
He was not interested in the uses of knowledge; he was interested only in how it confirmed or changed his theories of how the world worked. A common failing in wizards, who dosed themselves with drugs that accentuated obsessive-compulsive traits, and infected themselves with memes and partial eidolons to help them intuit the workings of Elder Culture algorithms. Unlike Fred Firat, who’d struck Tony as a sturdily practical sort, Cho Wing-James treated the stromatolites’ archival genetics as an intricate and fascinating puzzle rather than a library of ancient and potentially valuable secrets. He and his crew had squandered days studying some kind of Ghajar algorithm lodged in the magnetite arrays of the stromatolites; Cho had claimed that it might have been some kind of translation tool left over from an attempt by the Elder Culture to crack the archival genetics, but nothing had come of it.
At last, frustrated by his inability to persuade Cho to focus on finding something, anything, that could persuade the family council to extend its deadline, Tony took the wizard up to the clinic to show him what was at stake. It was Danilo Evangalista’s idea, actually. After listening to Tony vent one day, the young singer had asked if Cho had ever seen the effects of sleepy sickness. It turned out that the wizard hadn’t. It wasn’t something that had ever interested him, he said.
Tony was astonished. ‘Even though I hauled you and your friends out to the slime planet because Fred Firat claimed that the stromatolites would help us understand meme plagues?’
‘Oh, I know that Fred believed that,’ Cho said airily. ‘But I was only ever interested in the actual science.’
‘Sleepy sickness is an actual thing, too,’ Tony said. ‘It’s time you realised that.’
Tony, Danilo and Cho Wing-James travelled out to the clinic the next day, flying north in a spinner helmed by Lancelot Askia – a condition imposed by Opeyemi in return for permission to take the wizard on the little trip. Danilo pressed close to the transparent aluminium of the spinner’s bubble, pointing out sights to Cho as the spinner rose above the close-packed roofs of the city and flew out over patchwork farms and pine plantations, and the orange and yellow native forest climbing the slopes of the foothills. Snowy mountain peaks were chalkily sketched against the blue horizon, the boundary between the northern edge of Skadi’s habitable strip of land and the vast ice cap that stretched away towards the north pole.
Tony was charmed by Danilo’s innocent delight in these vistas. The singer wore the white fur jacket that Tony had given him for this trip, his long legs encased in tight red jeans. When he looked around and asked if that was the clinic ahead, his smile turned Tony’s heart.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be,’ Danilo said.
The spinner was flying above a lake towards rugged cliffs divided by the white ribbon of a waterfall. The heaped geodesic domes of the clinic straddled the swift river that fed the waterfall, glinting in cold sunlight and caught between steep slopes of yellow forest.
‘When I had a work placement here, eight years ago,’ Tony said, catching Cho’s gaze, ‘there were just over three hundred patients. That was bad enough. Now there are more than two thousand. All of them children, sent here from every world in the Commons. And all of them will die here, for want of a cure.’
Òrélolu greeted them at the landing stage and took them up to his office, where he and several staff members explained that the clinic had been founded by Ayo after the death of her eldest son, and gave a short description of its work and research programme. Cho sat through this quietly, but said at the end that he was pleased to see that they were using randomised trials. ‘A lot of what you people call science is indistinguishable from magic. Claims of secret knowledge and special talents, all kinds of weird rites and ceremonies, and so forth. It’s so rare and refreshing to find this kind of old-school methodology out here. Hopeful, even.’
‘Aunty Jael must take most of the credit for that,’ Òrélolu said. ‘She devised the experimental programmes. But despite all our work, we still have no idea what causes sleepy sickness, or how it is transmitted. And although we have prolonged the lives of some of our patients, we have yet to cure a single one.’
‘That is why your work is so important,’ Tony told Cho. ‘We hope that it will give Òrélolu and his crew a new direction.’
As they set out across a covered walkway that swooped above the river, linking the stark cube of the administration block with the accommodation domes, Òrélolu took Tony’s arm and sa
id, ‘I hear that you have moved out of the Great House and moved in with Danilo. Is it love, or just a silly stunt to piss off Opeyemi?’
‘I can assure you that there is nothing silly about it.’
‘You shouldn’t use the boy to score petty points, Tony.’
‘You set us up, cousin. And I am glad, now, that you did. And grateful. But frankly? Our relationship is none of your business.’
‘Then why did you bring him here to rub my nose in it?’
‘This visit was Danilo’s idea, actually. And it was also his idea to come along. I told him that he would see things that might break his heart; he said that if he shed a tear or two it would help my pet wizard to understand the reality of this. He is tougher than he looks.’
‘Even so, he is just an ordinary kid,’ Òrélolu said. ‘Suppose Opeyemi decides to get at you by hurting him?’
‘I will make sure he won’t,’ Tony said. ‘Oh, and by the way? The sex is amazing.’
They entered an observation cubicle raised high in the side of one of the domes. Below, fifty or so children shambled about the black-sand floor. Some dressed in pyjamas or cotton gowns, some naked. Some moving in little groups, some following solitary paths, some standing still, staring off at something beyond the walls of the dome.
All were pre-adolescents between ten and fourteen, and all were in the second stage of sleepy sickness. To begin with, sufferers began to sleep for longer and longer, eventually passing into a state of unconsciousness that lasted for as long as forty days. Most woke and showed no other symptoms, but one in a hundred developed aberrant behaviour similar to sleepwalking, becoming increasingly withdrawn until at last lapsing into a catatonic state and shortly afterwards dying.